


The exiles of Zilo are quite happy about it (and have no intentions to come back)

by Gabriel4Sam



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Apart Palpatine, Fix-It, Friendship/Love, M/M, Mace Windu Lives, Mace Windu deserves so much better, Palpatine gets eaten, The Zilo Beast lives!, and he had it coming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:46:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25668427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabriel4Sam/pseuds/Gabriel4Sam
Summary: Nothing would have been possible if the Chancellor of the Republic, and secret Sith, hadn't been eaten.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, CC-6454 | Ponds/Mace Windu
Comments: 8
Kudos: 239
Collections: Clone Wars Saved Exchange 2020





	The exiles of Zilo are quite happy about it (and have no intentions to come back)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wrennette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrennette/gifts).



> Many thanks to the sweet Sithsoka who ran to my rescue to beta this fic.

It was a hot, humid muffling that woke Mace up, then a hot, moist tongue as big as his face undertook the cleaning of his neck. 

He groaned, tried to push it away. 

“Should have called you Pushy instead of Ber,” he grumbled to the little Zilo beast, whose tail threatened to send the entire bedside table crashing to the floor. 

One important secret about Mace Windu, which he would like to take with him to his grave for his reputation’s sake, was that he was very much not a morning person until enough caf to wake long-dead Jedi had been poured into him. 

He heard a laugh, opened a glaring eye, then hands, friendly, charming hands, took away the animal clambering all over the bed. 

“You’ll have to wake up, one way or another,” Ponds remarked, wrangling the little beast away. Of all the brood, this one was the only one who accepted going indoors. It even liked it: it was more attached to Mace, who had nursed it back to health when it had been hatched, weak and frail, already at death’s door, than to its own parent who had rejected it to use all its energy to take care of its healthy siblings. 

Mace got out of the bed. 

After a few false starts. 

Ponds had left him a gigantic cup of caf, just as Mace preferred it, with only a splash of cream and no sugar. Mace had a besotted smile. Almost ten years after they had, in Shaak Ti’s words ‘run away like two teenagers wanting to aggravate their parents’. The love Ponds had for Mace, and which was answered by Mace’s adoration, was still a delightful surprise for the former Master of the Order. Every day, it was like seeing the dawn on a new world, like the first taste of water after long hours of gruesome work in the sun, like the caress of the Force. 

From the window of their bedroom, he could see the rough landing pad and a part of their installations. For long, their little colony hadn't had a name, it was only “the installations on the Zilo moon” and the moon herself didn’t even have officially the name Zilo, it was just the nickname everybody had started to give to the unnamed moon of an unnamed planet in an unnamed system

The landing pad was more a hastily prepared square, made by cutting down trees with lightsabers and hauling them away with the Force. It was also surrounded by rough buildings of the same tree. With the years passing and their community growing, things were smoothing out, and not only metaphorically. Mace had been ready to throw a party when he had put the management of the outpost into more capable hands, hands who knew something about it, the growing and planning of their small outpost. Hours poring over everything possible on the holonet about city planning and needs wasn’t the same as spending years studying the stuff!

Across the landing pad he could see Ponds and Obi-Wan discharging a ship with the help of Waxer and young Numa, who was certainly trying to help, but was apparently busier exploring everything they had received this time. For a long time, she had been the youngest of their colony, smuggled there by Boil and Waxer after they had learnt of her parents’ deaths. Mace had been anxious about her presence at the time. It was one thing for grown adults to decide to live in a colony in a previously uncharted part of space for the love of a gigantic lizard, it was another to impose it on a small child! 

But Numa had not only survived but flourished and when the other children had arrived, first a small group of very grumpy initiates who hadn’t been chosen for Padawan and had no intentions to join the Agricorps when they could play settlers and then a birth, their first one, to a former senatorial aid and the clone she loved….Mace had been, as the de facto leader of their small community, ready for it. 

Later, he finally wandered out. He was officially on a rest day, something implemented by Master Eerin the moment she had put her foot on planet and banded forces with Kix, but he had no taste for spending the day in their quarters. He helped Cody, who was repairing a speeder. He liked this brother of Ponds, calm, thoughtful, with a core of steel like all the vod. And much less exhausting than Fives could be!

Together; they repaired the damages made to the motor by the high level of humidity in the air, almost without a word. It was a simple task and Mace appreciated it. There was some simple joy in the mechanics. Something was not working and he could do something about it and then the object could once again fulfill its tasks! So much easier than space politics, their backstabbing and their secret Siths…And Cody was a good friend. Any man who had made the choice to accompany this crazy expedition was in Mace’s good book, but the clones more than anyone else: they had been freed something like three days before the departure of the expedition and still, with so little time to choose, with all the galaxy at the tips of their fingers, a good chunk of them had chosen to come and to help. 

So much, in fact, that they had established a rotation, giving them time to explore the galaxy too, and still have the Zilo’s colony as their base, a place to regroup. 

So, yes, clones were some of Mace’s favourites people, and Cody had been high on his list for making Obi-Wan happy, and while that had inspired his initial trust and friendliness towards Cody, it had slowly deepened into a friendship because of Cody himself, for his dry humour and his taste for terrible ales and long walks in the forest. 

“You’re daydreaming,” Cody remarked, “Please tell me you’re not daydreaming about my brother and your bed in my company.” Mace made a face and didn’t answer. After a life of chastity, it was strange that everybody knew he loved Ponds and Ponds loved him, even after years, even coming from Cody, who loved Obi-Wan and was loved in return. 

When the speeder was finally running, they loaded it with lunch and went away to join Obi-Wan and Shaak.  According to the roster, the two others were assigned to play guardians today , but nothing said an impromptu lunch on the grass couldn’t be organized. After all, it was a simple precaution, a presence which was needed, nothing lunch could break.

Twice already since their arrival, poachers had come from off world to try to kill their enormous friend and mascot. The two times, the Zilo Beast had eaten them, so it had never really been in danger. Nevertheless, prudence could never really hurt so now two Jedi were always standing guard. Also, people always made a fuss when the Zilo Beast ate someone, even when it had been provoked by people trying to hurt its young and they didn’t need more rumours on the holonet. It had already been complicated enough in the beginning when they had smuggled the Zilo beast off Coruscant in catastrophe, because they couldn’t be sure the Senate wouldn’t order its death. 

A small part of Mace, a part he wasn’t very proud of, still thought the poachers had it coming. 

Today, the beast was bathing in a small lagoon with its brood, minus the one who had chosen Mace as its parent. It had been such a joy to realize it reproduced by parthenogenesis. No longer the last of its species. 

And here it was. Glorious and enormous, glistening like a jewel between the droplets of water of the lagoon and the light of the sun. Alive. A beast supposedly extinct for centuries, alive and happy, with its children, as safe as it could be. 

Shaak and Obi-Wan were sitting on the shore, playing one of those horribly complicated board games from Alderaan that Mace found deeply boring. Obi-Wan was barefoot and Shaak had abandoned her outer tunic. Mace felt a pulse of joy, deep in his heart, as Cody put down their impromptu lunch on a blanket. 

He remembered, years ago. The exhaustion, the darkness. Shaak, frailer at every communication from Kamino, as she fought tooth and claw for the clones and lost, because the Senate was stacked against them. Obi-Wan, with bags under his eyes darker every day. His brothers and sisters, the ones he was supposed to guide, dying and Falling and coming back as shadows of themselves. 

They had traded all of that away when they had come here. The life of an exile was hard, but only in the way that it was hard work to colonize a world. 

And all of that wouldn’t have been possible without the Zilo beast. 

Like it had heard his thoughts, and despite what the Jedi more gifted in communication with semi-sentient beings said, Mace was almost sure the Zilo Beast could do it, the great head turned towards him. The Beast rolled over in the waves and splashed closer, its head leaning down to Mace’s level. 

“Hello, my friend,” the Jedi crooned without fear, as eyes bigger than himself lazily observed him. 

“No, don’t-“

Too late. 

The beast had licked him, a greeting it reserved only for Mace. Only its tongue was far bigger than its child’s!

Behind him, Mace could hear Obi-Wan stifle a laugh and the noise an elbow, probably Cody’s, Shaak had abandoned all sense of decorum years ago, made when connecting to the redhead’s stomach. With a sigh, Mace did what he always did in those moments, put his boots and socks on the sand and entered the lagoon, still dressed, to wash off the spit on his clothes and on his person. On the shore, Obi-Wan had thrown an arm around Cody’s waist and was whispering something in his ear which made the former Commander smile, soft and warm. 

Shaak was putting away their game and she laughed when all the brood came to welcome Mace in the exact same way as their parent, making all his efforts of washing away the spit for nothing. 

“That’s what you get for being the favourite,” Shaak quipped, her headtail almost vibrating in juvenile glee. Because here, she could. Here, she was free. 

Free because ten years ago, Mace and Ponds had refused to see the Zilo Beast put to death for having munched on the Chancellor of the Republic. At the time, they hadn’t known that the Chancellor had been a Sith, only the inquiries post-death had revealed it. 

Mace still had refused the Beast’s death. 

Ponds and him had crashed more than landed on this world, hurt, exhausted, with only the Beast and their tenacity and had been joined, little by little, by some other Jedi making the same choices, run away clones…And two years later, once the dead Chancellor had been officially and posthumously declared an enemy of the Republic, had they received their pardons and the opportunity to go back home to Coruscant. 

Mace had watched the envoy in silence for a moment, astonished that the other sentient didn’t understand. Ponds’ hand had searched for his and it was the former Commander who had answered, putting into words everything Mace and the other inhabitants of Zilo had felt. 

“Your Excellency,” Ponds had said, with this calm he had and half a smile, “We’re already home.”


End file.
